Bellaluna2 - Untitled

“I was just a kid from a little cow town in Montana, but I was convinced I knew everything.  So I got into a little tangle with my dad and ended up joining the Air Force.  They stationed me out in Spokane, Washington.  And not long after I arrived, me and a couple of buddies decided to take a day trip out to Liberty Lake.  It was a real neat little lake.  Fifteen feet deep and so clear that you could see straight to the bottom.  We started playing a little football on the beach, but then we noticed three girls out on a floating dock.  So we decided to swim out there.  The water was really cold.  And about halfway to the dock, I charley horsed in both my legs and started to sink.  I thought for sure I was going to drown.  When I woke up, I was laying on the dock, and one of those girls was staring down at me.  Apparently she’d seen me go under, jumped in her brother’s boat, and pulled me out by the hair.   That girl was named Dolores.  She saved my life in August of 1952, and she saved me again and again for the next 64 years.  We raised four children together.  Not only was she my wife, but she was also my mentor.  I was just a kid from Montana.  She turned me into a good man.  Her personality, her love, I’m talking deep love, for me and the children, changed me one inch at a time.  And she never lost that heart for rescuing people.  She worked with youth.  She worked in street ministries. Whenever somebody was in a little bit of trouble, Dolores would jump right in.  I know she sounds a bit like Wonder Woman, but she was.  We were inseparable.  People called us ‘joined at the hip.’  Two years ago she passed away.  And I’ll tell you the only reason I’m still living, because I know, that one day, I’m going to wake up in heaven, and see Dolores looking down at me one more time.”   #quarantinestories

I think that the Hamilton musical is objectively the funniest thing that could happen to that man’s memory. Imagine dying of a gunshot wound infection in 1804 and learning from the afterlife that tweenage girls in 2017 are drawing thousands upon thousands of images of you making out with your fellow congressmen because someone wrote a 2-hour rap opera about you. I like to imagine that Hamilton found a monkey’s paw and wished to leave a legacy, and this is what it did to him.

I couldn’t fix him, but I could fuck him, and that could fix me, and that’s more important.

(2/2)  “My mother died on July 6th, 2005.  One day toward the end of her life, we were in the subway together, carrying heavy packages, and I could see she was exhausted.  She turned to me and said: ‘A ganzeh leben is a schlep.’  Which means: ‘All of life is a schlep.’  And for a moment I felt her pain.  I realized I could still love her.  She couldn’t love me, but I could love her.  Despite all the abuse she’d given me, I could feel her pain.  I resurrected this old photo after her death.  She’s with her first husband.  It was weeks before he was taken away. She’s only twenty years old in this picture.  That gorgeous face.  That youth.  How could I possibly hate her the same way?  It’s unfathomable.  Not that she was right to be cruel, but it’s unfathomable what she went through.  I once helped her type a memoir to get reparations from the Germans. At the end of her story, she wrote: ‘It was a life of horror.  Having lost everything and everyone, I’d given up my struggle to live.  And at that time, it would have been easier if they had killed me.  But they didn’t.  So on I went, living in hell.‘”

Holy shit.

Don’t I Get a Dream for Myself ? – Bernadette Peters and the 'Gypsy' Saga

Gypsy. It’s perhaps the most daunting of all of the projects related to Bernadette Peters to try to grapple with and discuss. It’s also perhaps the most significant.

For someone notoriously guarded of her privacy and personal life, careful with her words, and selective of the questions she answers, the narrative around this show provides some of the most meaningful insights it is possible to derive in relation to Bernadette herself. The show’s ability to do this is unique, through the way it eerily parallels her own life and spans a large range in time from both Bernadette Peters the Broadway Legend, right back to where it all began with Bernadette Lazzara, the young Italian girl put into showbusiness by her mother.

The most logical place to start is at the very beginning – it is a very good place to start, after all.

(Though no one tell Gypsy this, if the fierce two-way battle with The Sound of Music at the 1960 Tony Awards is anything to be remembered. Anyway, I digress…)

Gypsy: A Musical Fable with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents, burst into the world and onto the New York stage in May of 1959. After closing on Broadway in March 1961, Ethel Merman as the world’s original Mama Rose herself led the first national tour off almost immediately around the country. Just a few months later, a second national touring company was formed, starring Mitzi Green and then Mary McCarty as Rose, to cover more cities than the original. It is here that Bernadette comes in.

A 13-year-old Bernadette Peters found herself part of this show in her “first professional” on-the-road production, travelling across the country with her older sister, “Donna (who was also in the show), and their mother (who wasn’t)”.

The tour played through cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, New Haven, Baltimore and Las Vegas before closing in Ohio in 1962. Somewhat uncannily, its September 1961 opening night in Detroit’s Schubert Theatre even returns matters full circle to the 2003 revival and New York’s own Schubert Theatre.

Indeed this bus-and-truck tour was somewhat of a turning point for Bernadette. She’d later remember, “I mostly thought of performing as a hobby until I went on the road with Gypsy”.

But while this production seminally marked a notable moment for the young actress as well as the point where her long and consequential involvement with Gypsy begins, it’s important to recognise she was very much not yet the star of the show and then only a small part of a larger whole.

Bernadette was with the troupe as a member of the ensemble. She took on different positions in the company through the period of nearly a year that the show ran for, including billing as ‘Thelma’ (one of the Hollywood Blondes), ‘Hawaiian Girl’, and additional understudy credits for Agnes and Dainty June.

The above photo shows Bernadette (left) with another member of the ensemble (Sharon McCartin) backstage at the Chicago Opera House as one of the stops along the tour. Her comment on the stage of the Chicago theatre – “I’d never seen anything so big in my life!” – undeniably conveys how her experiences were new and appreciably daunting.

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